Meet Debbie Harris, the UK entrepreneur with big plans to improve healthcare for Britain’s ageing population

The pressures on Britain’s health care sector, already creaking under the strain of an immense backlog of work, coupled with disruptive strikes throughout its workforce, is likely to reach breaking point as we move into the winter months.

Debbie Harris, Autumna speaking at the Retirement Housing Conference (Supplied)

However, there might be just one small beacon of hope in the form of Debbie Harris, the visionary founder of Autumna – a platform designed to help older people find care – who has a potential solution.

"One of the UK’s most pressing issues today, and one that will become even more acute this winter, is delays in discharging patients who are well enough to leave hospital," said Harris.

According to Care England, over 4.4 million bed days are lost each year.

“More often than not, these beds are occupied by older and more vulnerable people,” Harris continues. “They’re well enough to leave, but only if there is some sort of care package in place at home, or possibly in a residential or nursing home, to prevent readmission.

“And it’s finding that available social care package – specific to the needs of the patient - that is so often the stumbling block and the thing that produces the ‘bed-blocking’ and ‘corridor-care’ headlines that seem to come around every year.”

“If there’s no bed available for the person waiting in A&E, or waiting for their operation,” she explains, “then the wait has to continue. And if there’s no room in A&E, then the queue moves to the ambulance waiting outside. And if the ambulance is occupied it can’t, of course, pick up anyone else.

“Beds that are occupied by patients well enough to leave hospital, is a bottleneck that can only be ‘uncorked’ by a much more efficient link up between the hospital and social care.”

Harris believes her Autumna platform, with its highly curated UK database with more than 26,000 social care providers listed, together with a product called D.A.D (Dashboard for Accelerated Discharge) may be able to provide that link up.

“At Autumna, we’ve spent years building up a knowledge base that addresses every aspect of the questions that are asked (and answered) along the elder care journey. And armed with that information, we’ve built a searchable database with more detail than anything else available in the country.

“D.A.D sits on top of that database and automatically filters the detail enabling it to send hospital discharge teams shortlists of available care providers who can meet the needs of any specific patient on any particular day.”

Different to the current situation in hospitals

Debbie continues: “Different hospitals have different processes for discharge, but in general it’s still very much a manual process. So, it involves ringing individual care providers, hoping they pick up the phone, and then if they do, going through the specific patient details to see if they might be able to help. If they can’t of course, the whole process starts again.

In addition to the time-consuming nature of these calls, Harris also believes not every available care provider gets contacted.

“I often read that there’s no capacity to take any more hospital discharge patients, but that’s not what the care providers are telling me.”

This is backed up by a survey conducted by Autumna late last year where, of 40 care homes located within a seven-mile radius of one particular hospital in the South East, 32% of them said they had never been contacted by their local discharge team.

Of the ones that had, 63% were unhappy with the level of information provided by the discharge teams and 54% cited difficulties in getting medical staff to provide the extra patient details they needed.

“The general impression we got,” says Harris “was that there was a level of distrust between hospital staff and the care providers.”

The majority of discharges of older people from hospitals receive home care packages. Again, Harris thinks there may be a problem here if the old manual methods are used.

“Autumna’s online directory receives automatic updates every day from the various regulatory bodies that cover social care providers across the UK and the ‘churn rate’ for home care agencies is very noticeable.

“It’s mainly new ones coming on I’m glad to say but I would suggest, that with the best will in the world, discharge teams working with a well-thumbed paper-based list of tried and trusted contacts would be shocked at how many potential services they may be missing out on, simply by using a source that might be just a few months out of date.”

Can D.A.D help?

“We’ve had a consumer facing version of D.A.D up and running for well over a year,” explains Harris. “It’s in effect an online assessment tool and allows you to enter details on the type of care you need, whether you need permanent or respite care, it asks about your funding situation and of course location.”

Autumna has over 3000 people using this tool every month and of those, 21% are in a hospital bed waiting to be discharged.

“Again, we did some research, and of those 21%, the average time they had been waiting was 31 days. I have to say, we were pretty shocked. “As a result, what we’ve noticed now though is that patients are alerting the discharge teams to our service.”

In one case, a Welsh hospital discharge team, who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to find a place for an elderly gentleman for over 4 months, sent a request into Autumna, just before heading out to lunch. When they returned 40 minutes later, they were stunned to find that Autumna had found them a place.

“Because of the level of detail and the quality of the information in the Autumna database, we’re able to cast a much wider net, hit only those care providers who we know will be able to help and as a result get a much higher quality of engagement from those with availability.

“To be honest it’s not rocket science, but it can’t be done without the Autumna database.”

An ‘overnight success’ 15 years in the making

Like many ‘overnight successes’ an awful lot of time and hard work went into building the Autumna database.

“You could say work began on it about 15 years ago, when I was asked to organize care for my Aunty Margaret. I couldn’t believe how difficult it turned out to be," she recalled. "There wasn’t a great deal of online information at the time, but what there was was very fragmented and hard to collate.

“My aunt was what is known as a self-funder, or private payer, and what I found was that, although there was a certain amount of help available for local authority funded people, there was very little available for those with enough financial assets to actually make a choice about where they would spend their later years.”

So, based on her travels finding care for her aunt, and knowing there were other people like her in the same position, who were likely to be struggling, Harris set herself up as a ‘professional care home finder’ and launched a company called Chosen With Care in 2009.

Chosen With Care placed over a thousand individuals in selected care homes over the next ten years and provided free, invaluable advice to thousands of others.

"It was not only advice, however," Harris says. "I found so many people had so many questions and the answers were just so hard to come by.

“That’s when I began formulating the idea for Autumna - a kind of Rightmove for social care – which would give people all the answers to all the questions we’d found ourselves having to ask, in one easily accessible database.”

Autumna began initially by listing care homes, before introducing home care and live-in care agencies in early 2020 and then every retirement living development in the UK by 2021.

“Our goal was to get every elder care provider under one roof, with lots of searchable data presented in a format that was easy-to-navigate and easy-to-compare – in effect, the opposite to what was available at the time.

UK’s increasing elderly population

But with Autumna, Debbie is not just building a business; she’s crafting a brighter and more comfortable future for the UK’s ageing population.

“The format inevitably leads to a raising of standards across the sector as care seekers become aware that they have more choice and care providers work harder to try to make sure they’re chosen.”

While the wheels of change may turn slowly, timely solutions are urgent for an estimated 1.6 million elderly individuals who need care.

The UK’s Office for National Statistics 2021 census revealed that over 11 million people (18.6% of the England and Wales population) were 65 years or older — an increase of almost 2% from the 9.2 million in 2011.

"The problem is that the increase in life expectancy is not twinned with advances in healthy life expectancy," Debbie added. "Longer lives imply a greater need for care and support, but unfortunately, that could be an issue as there will be fewer people in the country to provide care."

On a quest to make a difference

Debbie is on a quest to make a difference for those seeking care for elderly or disabled family members and relatives, and she is clearly achieving her goal.

As traffic to the website has increased, Autumna has made its advice line available seven days a week, providing answers and free advice to all those in need. And as the demand for care services continues to rise with the ageing population, Autumna has proven to be a lifeline connecting social care seekers with the providers right for them.

"My mother looked after the elderly people all her life in the Buckinghamshire village where I grew up," she reminisced. "She had lots of people she would pop in and see, run errands for, and check on them. I never realised it until recently, but I feel that, in a way, I am carrying on that positivity."

Debbie Harris is not only a beacon of hope, but a champion of elderly care with a solution that will undoubtedly make a difference for millions of people and the country’s healthcare system.

The Independent’s newsrooms and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.